Exploring the Business of Online Video

How Do Search Engines Find Your Video?

Lets cut right to the chase – there is no silver bullet when it comes to ranking high on the search engines. I have worked with a ton of people over the years to enhance keyword ranking and this is what I recommend for anyone trying to get traffic from a search engine.

First – make sure that page that “holds” your video is loaded with keywords and relevant text. You’ll want to pay special attention to the metadata in the webpage header (title, keywords, etc), and to the text on the webpage itself. Use H1, H2, H3 headers if possible, and pack them with the keywords you’re hoping to promote. Make sure there are a few paragraphs of text on the same page, packed with keywords. Make sure you have other webpages linking to this page. Link to it from your blog. Try and get a link on message boards. The more links to the page (from external domains) the better.

Now that you’ve taken care of the basics, lets talk about how to get attention to the video itself. There is probably no place better to start with this than Google. There are two ways I would suggest helping the search engines find your video. First, you should embed the title and description of the video in the embed code you’re using. If you’re using Flash video, you should be able to include these fields in your object/embed code.

The second way you can draw attention from Google is to say “hey Google – my videos are over here!” by submitting a Google Video Sitemap XML file. Here is Google’s webpage that helps walk through the steps to getting your video indexed with XML.

Even though SEO is a huge buzzword, and attracts all kinds of attention and debate, I would recommend “buying” traffic using Google Adwords. Basically you choose your keywords, bid on a maximum per click, and set a dollar limit. This will definitely get you relevant traffic. For more information visit http://adwords.google.com. I’ve had a tremendous amount of success with Adwords with a dozen or so sites over the years. Google only charges you if someone clicks your ad, so if don’t get any clicks they will assume your offer has no relevance to the “keyword audience” and remove you from the list (of paid advertisers).

In summary, focus on the keywords and page construction, make sure you get lots of links to your page from other site (blogs, message boards, etc), and submit your pages to the various search engines for indexing.